Sometimes I think that the only reason that I still have an instagram account is to be able to follow a few dog breeders and “dog breed associations” (whatever the proper English expression is).

Played with Wordpress full-site editing and it was the worst user experience I’ve had in a long time. I had to use a theme that didn’t support full-site editing to get anything done

Yet another post about Castro, last month I posted about how I was giving up on Castro because of crashes, freezes, etc. In addition there hadn’t been any updates for about a year. Since then I’ve been trying out other podcast player trying to find a replacement, but I haven’t managed to find one that could replace Castro.

But happy days, a new version of Castro was released a couple days ago, and it’s not just a bug fix release. There are a number of new features, mostly related to making it easier to show/listen to subsets of the available podcasts. I haven’t really explored the new features but so far I’m very happy to see a new version.

Don’t get me wrong, SmugMug is a really good service … and would I make some money on my photography I wouldn’t hesitate to pay (even go for a more expensive plan), but I don’t make any money so I don’t know if I should save the money 🤔 15 months to think about it and prepare.

Sigh, since discovering the new pricing for the SmugMug plan I use, I can’t stop thinking about the price … I’ve been paying $89.95 since 2017 (last price increase), in 2021 I payed for three years so I’m OK until next summer. But now the price is $138 …

PSA : there are people like me who can’t read light text on dark background

A few months back there was a post that questioned if Castro was being actively maintained anymore, and my comment was something along the line of “It works, so I don’t worry until it stops working”.

Well, I’m now worrying. The last 2–3 months, I’ve seen an increase in number of crashes and freezes (Castro stops reacting to any input). To make things worse there appears to be no communication from the company, the last blog post was November 2020, the last tweet in March 2022, the last app update was a year ago, and support requests are seemingly slow or non-existent.

However, I still wouldn’t worry if Castro had worked, but the crashes are too many, the freezes occur daily … so I see no choice but to cancel my Plus-subscription. And, I’m sorry to do so, Castro is in my opinion the best podcast player around, and I haven’t found a good replacement. If it comes to life again, I’ll be super happy to subscribe again, but for now … well, I’m going to look for a new podcast player.

Det borde vara en straffavgift på “lustiga” rubriker

Det slog gnistor om Emanuel när norrbottningar kvalade till Svets-SM

Amusing moment of the day: a guy was chatting with a girl while walking into the university. The guy was more interested in the girl than the surroundings, so of course he walked into a door 😁.

But he got a nice sympathetic smile from the girl

The two things I miss most from Mailsmith: superb filtering and top-of-the-line text editor.

That feeling I get when I want to ask a few questions about something. Before posting the question I do a search to see if someone have an answer to the question … and the only thing I find is a post by me asking the same question a couple of years ago

I find it rather pathetic that Excel can’t open two files with the same name.

Sigh, we now have two cats and one mouse in the house …

Working from home makes very obvious that cats sleep alot, and I mean alot. Seems like life is play, sleep, make sure that food is served, a quick visit outdoors, get some more food, sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep, play, sleep, sleep, quick visit outside, sleep, sleep, sleep …

I don’t feel like I’m qualified to give anyone advice on what software to use, there are a few reasons for this:

• I’m me, no-one else is me. With this, I mean that I have numerous preferences, opinions, and idiosyncrasies + some work tasks, probably in a unique combination. No other person has this combination, so why should anyone listen to me.
• I switch software once in a while, I can use some application for a couple of years, and then switch to another application—in other words, I’m jumping around between applications.

Anyway, what I can tell you is that I have many tools I use to get my stuff done in a way I like, here goes.

Text editor

My work requires me to write a lot of email, text files, code, messages, etc. I’ve done this on various platform Unix, Linux, whatever the OS the computers by Norsk Data had, and various other platforms. But I’ve spent at least 30–35 years using Macs.

I’ve used various text editors and word processors, for example vi, vim, emacs, ted, nano, word, word perfect, nisus, write now, claris works, etc. Once I got a Mac my main writing tool was nisus, but I stopped using word processors because I felt they were too fiddly, and I spent too much time trying to get a good-looking result. So, plain text files are my thing.

And as I’ve hinted to above, I’ve tried many text editors, but to me, there is only one that works the way I like BBEdit. I’m not saying it’s perfect, it’s not, but it’s the best editor for me. And since I’ve been using it for close to 30 years, I feel confident to say that it’s very, very good. And rock solid, I’m happy when I manage to crash BBEdit because then I can write an email to BareBones Software and say “guess what I managed to do??”.

I don’t know if it’s good or bad that I get to write these emails very, very rarely.

Document format

When I started to write stuff on a computer I used formatting languages like roff, troff, nroff, and a few others that I don’t remember the name of. I then used the formats offered by Word (bad idea since it happened that one version of Word couldn’t read the files of a previous version!!), WriteNow, Nisus, etc. As I mentioned above, Nisus became my write tool of choice and I had almost all of my documents in that format.

However, I like text only, so when I started to write more serious stuff I switched to TeX and LaTex (and hated the way how you were supposed to change the layout). I kept using it for much of my text needs until Markdown was first released. Now my writing is almost exclusively in one or the other version of Markdown. Unless I need to write a serious article, then it’s LaTeX—it doesn’t happen that often anymore.

Email

I’ve only used my current mail client (MailMate) for 5–6 years, perhaps more. It’s good by my favourite was Mailsmith, originally by BareBones Software. It had an excellent text editor (no surprise since they make BBEdit), and the best filtering system I’ve used. Unfortunately, it is/was POP3 only, so when I needed to use IMAP I had to stop using it. I played around with all major clients, but ended up with MailMate.

An essential part of email management is the handling of spam, and there is only one tool to care about SpamSieve. It’s one of those programs that you don’t notice until you don’t have it. It works with most email clients and … just buy it, it’s worth it!!

Bibliographic references

I’ve used EndNote, it’s crap. I’ve played with others like Zotero, Mandalay, Papers, etc. but they are not for me. Once again, I like plain text, so I use the BibTeX format. My research references are all in BibTeX format, and I use various command line tools (bibtools) and the macOS app BibDesk to manage them.

Privately, more for fun, then I use Bookends, I’ve been using it now and then since it was a HyperCard stack.

Programming

Due to my work, computer science teacher at a university, I’ve tried a fair number of programming languages. I liked Modula-2 and ML, sometimes writing C code can be relaxing, Haskell is neat, Java … well, it used to be fun, etc. But the language I, personally, find most useful is Python—it’s certainly not the best language for all problems, but for me, it’s the most useful one.

The short version of all this

• Text editor—BBEdit, if I can’t use it, then it’s vim.
• Text format—Markdown, until I need something complex or good-looking
• Email—MailMate, however, at work I need to use Mail, so I can use the stupid Exchange stuff.
• Spam management—SpamSieve, nothing more need to be said.
• Reference management—data in BibTeX + a collection of suitable tools
• Programming—Python

I, of course, use a fairly large set of applications daily, but the stuff above is what I’ve been using for at least 5–10 years … and for some reason they get installed on every Mac I get my hands on.

Almost 😜

Miles Bron (shuffle) Elon MXsX

Jag fick just lära mig att jag är “åldersrik” dvs gammal

I feel sorry for IconFactory and Tapbots, but I’m looking forward to Ivory

I hear complaints that it’s difficult to remember to write 2023 instead of 2022. I’m planning for spring 2024 and have started to consider staffing for autumn 2025. As a teacher I had a planning horizon of 9 weeks … maximum

20-30 cm snow during the night, 20-30 cm yesterday. The world is starting to look the way it’s supposed to look

One of the days I wish I was an iOS/macOS developer … I have an idea for an app that I want to see/use … but I haven’t the time to learn iOS/macOS development, so it will just be a thing to be frustrated about.

A show of hands

Hmmm, I apparently have a Medium account … I thought I had deleted it. I wonder if I should use it …

It’s snowing today, most of the neighbors seem to have the same hobby today: shoveling snow.

But some doesn’t seem to know good snow shoveling etiquette 🤦🏻‍♂️

The Photowalk podcast - it’s worth listening to.